A few posts back, Alistair wrote about Human 2.0, focusing on sensory immersion, augmented reality. and bridging the gap between the human and the screen. These techniques are only half of the Human 2.0 equation -  they modify the environment – the inputs – not the human body itself.

Human 2.0 is about breaking human performance barriers, both mental and physical, by modifying the human body and environment. Think transhumanism. Biogerontology. Life extension. Brain hacking. Body hacking. Even baby hacking.

I’ve been interested in these fields for more than a decade, to the point that I have my own EEG at home so I can read my brain waves and learn to modify them at will. Some people have closets full of golf clubs they never use. Mine is full of soliton lasers, cerebro-electric stimulators, light/sound goggles, micro pulse generators, and FIR-LED neuron growth stimulators. I can’t wait to get my own Emotiv headset.

Smart drugs? Tried them all (and I won’t say if I take them now). I’m a board member of a non-profit called the Smart Life Forum that meets once a month in Palo Alto. (Third Thursday of the month – check it out; I’ll be there…) SmartLife’s advisors include leading anti-aging physicians and Steve Fowkes, author of “Smart Drugs II,” and head of the Cognitive Enhancement Research Institute. Hormone testing? Been there. SPECT scan? Done that. Ayahuasca? Check. You get the point. Ray Kurzweil definitely gets the point.

So why does this topic belong on Bitcurrent? The reason is not obvious. The bio hacking things I’ve done until now mostly treated my mind and body as a standalone entity. That’s the equivalent of a mainframe from the 70′s, or a PC before the days of vampire taps. A combination of technologies including bluetooth, 802.11, GPRS, and even SOAP, are enabling us to, for the first time, consider hooking humans up to the internet, and to translate our biological signaling into digital signals. That ROCKS!

But here’s the problem, and the reason Bitcurrent is the place to talk about it. What happens when you add a few billion people to the internet, each streaming an almost unimaginable amount of data, including accelerometer (not just iPod), biological, environmental, sound, video, EKG, EEG, pulse, barometric pressure, inside and outside temperature, GSR, immune function, particle count, etc? What happens makes the existing streaming media capacity problem look like mouse nuts. Or Grape Nuts. (note to self: dial back on the Piracetam)

I spent time over the last year as a technology and strategy advisor to a stealth-mode startup with more than $10 million in funding which is doing exactly that: monitoring humans using the web. This is important because the first step to managing distributed systems is to monitor individual nodes in order to understand the state of the system. This fascinating startup promises to do just that: let people understand – and share – the state of their bodies and minds.

Now that’s Human 2.0, internet style!

I’ll blog about these topics some more, and I’ll disclose more info about the startup when it’s no longer stealth. But don’t forget – those of us who really understand web operations and distributed systems are some of the best people to design Human 2.0 monitoring and mangement systems. Doctors, med-tech geeks, and health gurus know things that web operations people never will, but they usually don’t have the operational mindset and experience that comes from scaling and running big internet companies. And if you think you care about the uptime SLA of your web site, how important will the SLA be for your brain implant monitoring service?